Page 60 of The Malevolent Eight

‘Those leather trousers would be constraining in a duel,’ the rat mage continued. ‘Idolike those cloaks, however. Perhaps we could add epaulettes?’

‘Now you’re talking, rat boy!’ Corrigan bellowed.

This is the problem with wonderists: they’re inherently emotionally unstable and utterly incapable of taking imminent death seriously. Well, except me, of course. I’mexceptionalat taking death seriously. Despite how hard I’d been working to avoid using spells in front of the others that might give away my attunement, I prepared myself to conjure up a piece of catastrophic nastiness, just in case diplomacy didn’t work. ‘Those capes are a little too short to serve as shrouds,’ I said to the eight wonderists. ‘On the other hand, we’ll be happy to chop your corpses up into little pieces to make everything fit.’

‘Will you fucking relax?’ Tenebris asked, his hands still probing each of his four horns to make sure Shame had put everything back exactly where it was supposed to be. ‘I told you, these guys are working for us.’

‘The Pandoral’s doomsday cult is working foryou?’ I demanded, grabbing Tenebris by the collar of his newly restored brocaded coat. ‘You told ustheywere the ones who’d captured you and turned you over to the Aurorals!’

He shrugged off my grip and handed the Glorian Banner to the felinist, who, unlike Aradeus, was the sort of totemist who went out of her way to look like her chosen symbol. ‘That was part of the plan. We needed to make the Pandoral believe that these guys were part of his stupid doomsday cult– that way, he wouldn’t suspect that either the Celestines or the Devilish were the ones who’d recruited eight of the toughest and most cunning wonderists in the entire Mortal realm’– he gave me a smarmy sideways glance– ‘present company definitely included.’

‘They don’t look like much to me,’ Corrigan muttered sulkily.

‘Well, unlikeyourweak-arse crew,’ Tenebris countered, ‘my guys have not only fooled the Pandoral into elevating them to his inner circle, they’ve got a way to destroy that bug swarm piece of shit before he can channel the ecclesiasm of this world into his own fucked-up plane of reality.’ Being an inveterate showman, the diabolic couldn’t help but swing his arm out wide. ‘In other words, boys and girls, the Mortal realm is about to be saved by—’

‘Don’t say it,’ Corrigan warned. ‘Don’t you dare fucking say it.’

But he was too late, for Tenebris was declaring proudly, ‘—the Apocalypse Eight!’

Chapter 33

The Unfathomable Eight

There was something truly tragic about standing outside that temple listening to my rag-tag crew of misfits bickering about whether we should let the coven of far more disciplined, far more organised and– according to Corrigan, who was shouting loudest– better-dressed wonderists take on the mission to hunt down and destroy the last remaining Pandoral. Personally, I was entirely happy to let them deal with both the Pandoral and his cult of lunatic worshippers.

‘What are they doing with the banner?’ I asked Tenebris.

He chuckled in that way diabolics do when they’re about to tell you how easily they played you for a fool. ‘You thought we wanted that rag just to parade it in front of the Aurorals, didn’t you, Cade?’

‘Something like that.’

I find letting people convince themselves that they’ve got the upper hand is more productive than getting into a debate over who’s cleverer. Also, the restaurant aside, it seemed to me that Tenebris had been having a rough time since his bosses brought him over to the Mortal realm. No point in ruining all the poor guy’s fun, or not all at once, at least.

‘The Glorian Banner itself never interested us at all,’ my diabolical former agent went on, gesturing to the shrinking piece of gold and ivory fabric which the skeletal-looking incarcerationist was ritually cutting into strips. ‘The fabric, though? I don’t think the Lords Celestine realised just how much potency they imbued into each of those gleaming threads.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together as if he were talking about money. ‘There’s more raw Auroral magic in there than any other relic they ever created.’

‘So what?’ I asked. ‘Your goons are turning it into some sort of weapon?’

Again he graced me with that stupid ‘smarter-than-thou’ chuckle of his. ‘Not a weapon, Cadey-boy. These guys figured out a way to transform the banner into somethingwaymore useful.’

The florinist– they’re the ones who usually bring trees and plants to life– was now reshaping part of the banner into a cloth mask, the luminist– apparently not as useless as his vocation suggested– was imbuing tendrils of luxoral magic into the precious threads, while the incarcerationist was gleefully winding several of the strips into a pair of shackles of gold and silver, all of which was making it hard to decide which I instinctively detested more, luminists or incarcerationists.

‘The mask. . .’ I began, trying to imagine how intricate the spells would need to be to redirect the Auroral blessings in the threads in the way the luminist seemed to be doing. Although I was no longer attuned to the Auroral realm, I still retained a certain sensitivity to its magical effects. ‘He’s creating some kind of veil with optical properties, isn’t he?’

Tenebris elbowed me painfully in the ribs. ‘See? You’re not nearly as dumb as you look.’ He whispered the next part. ‘And you’re a freaking genius compared to your idiot crew. You want I should ask these other guys if they’ll let you join their coven when this is all done?’

‘You’d do that for me?’

Diabolics, despite their sarcastic nature, don’t always recognise it in others. ‘Sure! I mean, you’d have to pay me a finder’s fee for getting you the gig, of course.’

‘Isn’t the finder’s fee usually charged to the employer?’

‘I’ll charge them one, too, obviously. Anyway, yeah, Erghroth over there is using his florinist abilities to re-weave the threads of the banner into a mask that will help them track their quarry while Vestisius the Legendary—’

Yes, you heard that right. Luminists almost all give themselves names likeSo-and-so the Legendary.

‘Vestisius is binding luxoral magic into the mask so that the wearer will be able to perceive otherwise invisible forces. And since sentient beings of the Pandoral realm entering this plane manifest as bipedal swarms of sentient beetles and are therefore kinda slippery, Direlock there– stupid name, even for an incarcerationist– is performing an esoteric transmutation on the strips of the banner to create a pair of handcuffs not even Bug-face can escape.’

‘Or anyone else your incarcerationist chooses to put them on?’ I suggested.

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